When I first discovered the power reverse engineering my competitors, I was in 7th heaven. It was as if a great weight was lifted off my shoulders. I'm a professional blogger and I've been doing this for many years now, I've made quite a bit of money doing this. But previously, I would work really hard creating tons of content and at the end of the day would have very little to show for all the time effort and sacrifice. How come? Well, it turned out, I was writing stuff that nobody really wanted to read. It's that simple. I know that sounds funny and quite sad, but believe me, I'm not alone. In fact, most online publishers commit the same rookie mistake. The sad fact is the vast majority of them never get past this mistake. Their inability or unwillingness to fix this problem led to the early death of their businesses.
I was able to overcome this problem by doing one thing. This came to me as an afterthought. But I pulled one simple trick and it solved a lot of problems for me. What am I talking about? Well here's the problem. You have to know what sells in your niche. You want to figure out what's in demand. So my solution was to reverse engineer my competition. Instead of going with what I thought was hot and awesome, I just focused on what everybody else was doing, looked for common pattern, verified what is hot based on objective social media signals and came up with my own content. That's how I was able to create stuff that actually gets read. That solved my problem quite a bit. But the problem is, it didn't take me to the next level. That's when I came up with another trick.
You have to understand, if you're creating original content, it's going to be very expensive. Even if you're writing this stuff yourself, it's going to be expensive. Why? Time is money. If you're spending half the day writing stuff, then you're not spending that time doing something else that might actually pay you more. Do you see how this works?
Opportunity costs are all too real. This is why I desperately needed a solution. I wanted to attract niche targeted traffic from social media and elsewhere, but I only have so much time and money to invest in original content creation.
I know what to produce. The problem is, I don't have enough resources to produce that type of content. This is where one simple trick again, saved my butt and took my business to a whole other level. The solution? Content curation.
The solution: interviews. That's right, I would interview credible and authoritative people in my niche and give them a link back for the interview. This may seem simple, but everybody has an ego. When you get interviewed, I can guarantee that you probably would want to tell your family and friends that you got interviewed.
At the very least, you probably would want to post a link to the interview on your Facebook wall. Well, a lot of these authoritative figures in my niche did more than that. A lot of them actually ran blogs. What do you think happened? That's right. They would link my interview with them from their blogs. This proved to be a tremendous boost to the SEO of my website and I was able to get more traffic from Google. Since I got more traffic, I was able to make more money from my website. This is how you save a lot of money on content marketing while at the same time increasing your traffic. Pretty awesome, right? Well, if you want a step-by-step description of how this is done, click here.
Comments